How to make Movable Type do Radio Userland "Stories"

Radio Userland has a feature called "Stories" which allows you to write items outside
the normal chronological flow of posts. I had a few "Stories" in my old Radio Userland
weblog that I hadn't migrated over to Movable Type, mainly because I was not sure what
the best way was to do that.

Initially, it seemed like the only way I could incorporate my stories into MT was to
create a separate index template for each story. This would be okay if I planned on
never having more than a few stories, but it would quickly become unmanageable as the
number of stories increased.

Then I read Brad Choate's post,
"Doing your whole site with MT". This
method is *much* better than creating separate index templates for every story.
Using the steps in his post as a guide, this is what I did on my blog:

1. Created a new Movable Type blog and named it "bradchoate.com: Static Content".

I created a new MT blog and named it "The Tweezer's Edge: Stories" - it seemed to
fit better with what I was going to use it for.

2. Deleted all the Index templates.

This seemed really unusual until I fully understood how everything worked. I did
initially delete all of the index templates, but ended up adding a main index
template afterwards to display an index of story (entry) titles.

3. Deleted all the archive templates, except for the Individual archive template.

I followed this step exactly.

4. Made sure individual archives were enabled.

I followed this step as well.

5. Made the archive path the root directory of my web site.

By doing this, you can then direct MT to create the story html files anywhere in your
weblog. I wanted my stories to all be placed under my "archives" directory, so I
made the archive path the same as my main weblog.

6. Created categories for each directory I want to create content for (category name
= directory name).

I did not want to use categories for my stories, so I did not perform this step.

7. Used the following for the Individual Entry Archive filename template (specified
on the "Archiving" page of your weblog configuration). Produces: "category/entry_title.html":

Since I did not intend to use categories, all I needed for the file name template was
"stories/entry_title.html", so this is the archive filename template I used:
stories/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

With this setup, each entry in this weblog becomes its own separate page without the need
for separate templates.

As I noted in step 2, I did add an index template to display a list of story (entry)
titles. The only issue I had with my story index template was that I wanted to include
some template modules from my main blog, but MT does not provide a way for one weblog
to access modules in another weblog. Then I discovered the
OtherBlog plugin, which allowed me
to do exactly that.

This is really a slick way to handle "stories" and other static content. I've now
finally migrated my stories into MT. In my links column (under "Navigation"), my
About Me page is a story, and my index of stories
can be viewed by clicking on the Stories Index link.

Categories:

1 TrackBack

Wow, the sound of my own hand slapping my forehead with a loud, "duh!". The TweezerMan (not sure if I want to know the story behind that name) has provided easy to copy templates for creating RSS Feeds for Trackbacks... Read More

Search

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by TweezerMan published on October 29, 2003 1:20 AM.